THAT’S LOVELY, BUT WHAT’S THE JOB?
On a day-to-day basis, Support Engineers act as Jellyvision's Level 3 Support team. That means you'll be working with the Jellyfolk who use and implement the tools and products we make, fixing the problems that they have and putting the sunshine back in their day. You'll also be documenting what you see and getting those solutions out there so that the next time an issue pops up, that person can solve it themselves and just keep on rolling.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, though, so you'll also be looking for ways to stop problems before they can crop up. One day, that means making our codebases easier to troubleshoot; the next, you're improving the technical documents we give to our customers. That means we're looking for folks with an interest in infrastructure, a desire for documentation, and a broad background of technical experience. When you see an opportunity to make someone's work easier (including your own!) by writing a tool, shoring up a wiki page, or teaching them an easier way, you won't have to wait until a lean sprint to do it — instead, it's literally your team's mission.
Of course, both of these responsibilities will put you in contact with people all over the company. Jellyvision Engineering fosters a strong sense of collaboration, and that doesn't stop with engineers: you'll build close relationships with QA, DevOps, account managers, and a lot of other people. Everyone at Jellyvision is smart, but not everyone has a technical background, and you'll need to demonstrate respect for their strengths while complementing them with your own.
WHAT KIND OF SKILLS SHOULD YOU HAVE?
In most job descriptions, we'd list a bunch of languages and frameworks here (and don't worry, that's coming later). But even more important to us in this position is someone who demonstrates:
- Patience and empathy: By the time someone is asking you for help, it's probably the worst day of their week. You'll need to be able to discover and understand not only their problem, but all the context and feelings that come with that problem. Then you'll get back to solid ground and work with them until their problem is solved.
- Delight in debugging: On the Engineering Support team, you're going to spend a lot of time looking for root causes, so it'll go a lot easier if debugging brings you joy, not frustration. Similarly, thinking of weird places that things could go wrong should lift your spirits rather than dampen them — not least of all because you'll be able to then go on and fix them.
- A methodical approach to problem-solving: Every bug has a reproducible cause and every issue has at least one viable solution. To find that cause and deliver that solution, you'll need to plan, consider, and act, rather than just try a bunch of things to see what works. You should be able to sustain yourself on incremental progress rather than waiting for the a-ha moment, working the problem until you find something that fits.
- Skilled technical writing: Understanding how a system works is one thing, but we want to see that you can distill that understanding into tutorials, training, and other documentation that's accessible to people at varying levels of technical ability. You should be the kind of person who is beloved by their coworkers for the clarity and usefulness of their comments on tickets, code reviews, and READMEs.
- Curiosity and proactiveness: The flip side of helping people is setting them up to not need help in the first place. Once an issue comes up a few times, you should be looking to stop it from coming up again, whether that's with documentation, a tool, or a configuration change. And we want someone who is curious enough to go looking for ways to improve our ability to help people.
- The ability to build bridges: When you're trying to triage the three things on your plate, it helps to have good relationships with the people your decision will affect. You should be a natural at reaching out beyond your team and building trust with people in other departments, so you can lean on them during crunch time.
- Power user sense: Not everything you encounter will be a problem with code: sometimes you'll need to clear a cache or check a firewall setting or look at background processes. Because of this, you should have a good idea of where the knobs and levers are for common software like Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari, macOS, iOS, and Windows.
- JavaScript, HTML, and CSS: A solid, nuanced understanding of how JavaScript, the DOM, Web APIs, and HTTP all interact is crucial for this role. We're using React/Redux and Sass (for the most part), so familiarity there is good, and some experience with templating languages like Dust or Mustache is a bonus too.
- Ruby: Most of our backend services are written in Ruby — usually Grape and Rails, so fundamentals are important. Alongside this, you should know how to interrogate an API and demonstrate your deep and abiding love of HTTP here too.
- Databases: We use Postgres and CouchDB (for the most part), but if you know a little bit about traditional RDBMSs, a bit about NoSQL databases, and you've occasionally thought to yourself, "maybe I should just throw this in a JSON file somewhere", you'll be good to go.
- Shell: You'll likely be working on the command line a lot, so being comfortable in the shell will be a boon.
- Python: Our Data team uses Python for its backend services, and our DevOps team uses it for their Jenkins scripts, so if you know your way around, it'll definitely come in handy.
- PHP: Though most of our backend has been migrated to Ruby and Python, we still have some PHP hanging around, so familiarity with PHP's particulars is a positive.
ARE THERE ANY PERKS? Yes, we love perks.
- Competitive pay, 401(k) with matching, stock options and benefits. We pay 100% of the cost of premiums for medical, dental, vision, disability and life insurance for our employees (as long as you qualify for our tobacco-free discount; if you’re a tobacco user, your medical premiums will be higher than $0). We also cover a really nice chunk of the cost of premiums for spouse/dependent medical, dental and vision insurance.
- Casual dress and a flexible schedule. Come in a sweatshirt, jeans, whatever, like everyone else here.
- Creative work environment. We are lucky to work in a place that is full of intelligent, talented and innovative folks. Although most hours the place is deathly quiet (we're a focused bunch), this is punctuated with hilarious outbursts and general merriment, which makes a nice way to spend the day.
- Free food. Every week, we stock our kitchen with free healthy snack foods, and we have a catered lunch every other week to give people a reason to hang out and eat together.
- Easy transportation and lots of love for folks who bike to work. We’re really close to the North/Clybourn red line stop and the Halsted (#8) bus (right by the Apple Store and Mega Whole Foods too), and we have a transit FSA that allows you to dedicate pre-tax dollars to public transportation expenses. A number of our employees like to bike to work, so we also have bike storage, showers and lockers in the office. And for those without their own bike in the city, we offer free divvy memberships – complete with Jellyvision bike helmets you can borrow from the office.
- Did we mention our yoga class? We bring a pro instructor right to the office. Fully subsidized by Jellyvision and fully optional, btw.
- Oh! And we have a massage chair. Not just any massage chair, my friend. It’s the HumanTouch HT 5320 WholeBody™ Massage Chair. Feeling a little stiff? Sit down. Relax. Feel better? Good. Okay, back to work.
We look forward to hearing about you and what you do. Make sure your application includes:
- A cover letter that highlights three reasons you think you’d be great for the gig, focusing on how your past experience has prepared you for this kind of position. Writing is key to all we do, and we weigh cover letters heavily. We love a cover letter that really shows us your personality (check out our company bios to see the wide range of personalities we’ve already got in house), but don’t stress if you’re not a comedian. You don’t have to be funny. Just be yourself. We’re mostly interested in learning who you are, what you love to do, and why you’d love to do it here with us.
- Your resume
Please know that every single application we receive is read by a real live human being. However that kind of thoughtful review takes time, so it may take us a little while to get back to you (but we will, we promise). In the meantime, NO FOLLOW UP PHONE CALLS OR EMAILS, PLEASE. It’s not that we don’t love hearing from you. It’s just that time spent responding to follow ups could be spent…well…reading your application. Please rest assured that if you received a confirmation from Recruiting Robot, we’ve got your application, and will get back to you really soon. We knew you’d understand.
If you still have pressing questions in the meantime, please feel free to check out our handy-dandy FAQ page!
Thanks for your interest in Jellyvision!